Ford Fiesta gets power boost with 100 octane fuel

In Europe, you would usually get 95 octane or higher fuel at the pumps; in the US, it’s usually 91 octane or lower. For most of us who drive ‘normal’ cars (as oppose to performance cars), we don’t think that it would make a difference.

But this experiment by The Smoking Tire has shown that you can turn an ordinary car into something extraordinary. They poked around the Ford Fiesta ST, which was rated at 217hp in its pristine form, made some minor modifications and fed it with 100 octane fuel; their meddling actually bumped up the power to 240hp. That’s no small increase. It was dyno-tested too, and dynos don’t lie.

Here’s how they did it: